The first interview

Apper is a consultant company in the area of system integration and service oriented

architecture. Their main task is modernizing and integrating old systems and applications. The main part of the company is coming from an international consultancy company named IBS (International Business System) group. IBS was founded in 1987 and was focusing on

developing and selling standard packages for manufacturing, finance etc. The interviewee started as a senior consultant at IBS in 1987 and then he became a consultant manager. Besides, he has the task for selling their services and during last years he has been sale marketing manager. He knows all the aspects of their consultancy and knows well about all the products.

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At the end of 1980s, IBS realized that there were a lot of big Swedish companies which were used to buy consultancy but they didn’t buy consultancy from IBS since they probably didn’t want to buy standard packages. Therefore, the company started consultancy beside the normal standard packages business. The company has been developing applications for Volvo, SKF, different banks and insurance companies. As examples, they have been doing a part of Volvo importer applications and also applications for credit cards for banks. They have been successful over the years and from the beginning they have been focusing on special technologies, the focus was on IBM midrange computer and later on IBMI and nowadays IBM power systems. So in that MIS market beside the consultancy and also focusing on IBMI computers they were the number one consultancy company in Sweden, he said. They were not only focusing on

consultancy business, but they were also training developers with different languages used for their platforms as well as training students in the area of SOA. When they found out that developing the products help them produce creative code with higher quality, they thought this can be beneficial for the customers as well; thus, they became also reseller for those type of products. After year 2000 they realized that they had to broaden their consultancy beyond the IBM platforms; hence, they started with java development and also .NET development. Now they are a more complete consultancy company with a broader talent and knowledge. They do everything from gathering requirements, development, test, integration, management etc. The IBS had business with more than 20 countries.

In November 2011, IBS is bought by a smaller company named Apper. And most of the

consultants are coming from IBS. The company has 100 consultants and many big companies as customers. Apper is smaller but they did the same thing as IBS did, the tasks and consultants are the same and only the owners have been changed. To be clear in my report, wherever I use the term “the company” I mean the Apper company but with 25 years background of IBS.

They have been working together with very big companies with lots of applications developed over the years often with old different technologies. The need for modernizing the applications and combining them with new features has become serious, and mostly companies don’t have the probability for building the system from the scratch. In such situations, the consultant company helps them to modernize their system by using the existing services and functions and adding new features. The interviewee said that as the company does maintenance and

modifications to very big existing applications they have started using SOA philosophy for many years.

The interviewee said that in order to modernize a system, they need to analyze where they are now, what the customer can do today, how they can support the business, what the requirements for future are, where the company is thinking of going and such questions. He added that

answering these questions needs to put a great effort in understanding the business domain and customers’ requirements clearly and this effort cannot be done without cooperating with the

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customer. He believes that identifying services and business processes and developing the system is a journey, it should be done all together. Consultants don’t know about the exact business processes and business logic in an enterprise, and if the customer doesn’t cooperate with SOA consultants efficiently, there wouldn’t be a guarantee for a successful implementation of SOA. He said “This is not a crystal ball to be shown to the customer, and say that this is how the application will look like to do your business. All the people involved in the system are the ones who help us to evolve the system”. There are always questions in the beginning of the projects like what SOA is supposed to do for the organization, how they are going to make it work etc., such questions create the starting point for gathering requirements and documents as well as people around the project.

He highlighted that not only the users of the system should to be integrated in identifying the system but also other stakeholders who has key role in the enterprise must be involved, but their level and involvement is different. The interviewee discussed that high level of user involvement is essential as users use the system and they know what they would like to do today. He also claimed that some CEOs of companies who bought consultancy didn’t understand their own business exactly until they got involved in the process of modernizing their system from early phases of SOA deployment. He mentioned that in some projects, managers and sponsors are not involved in the service identification process, they just prefer to invest the money and be

informed about the cost and time according to the schedule. But when the project confronts with some obstacles in terms of changes or other reasons, then they are curious to know what is happening, where the money is spent, how long it takes to be fixed and such questions. They would realize their importance of involvement in the process in order to make wiser decisions about time and cost of the projects as well as break down the obstacles in smart ways. The interviewee thinks managers should be involved from the early phases of SOA since they are the ones who decide where to go and they also have the money.

The level of user involvement regarding to details or more sketch level varies from one project to the other and it depends how much the consultancy company already knows about the systems. The company’s strategy for identifying business services is setting several meetings with stakeholders regularly to be able to discuss everything related to the business domain and

understand system requirements better. In this way the company develops customer systems in a agile way to add new functionality and deploy it very often, and this means they could constantly make the application better. The company use prototyping in order to create better understanding of the business processes and requirements. The interviewee said that although users may have deep knowledge in the area, conveying the requirements and memorizing everything is not easy as they are human beings. Therefore, visualizing the process is the most appropriate way to make a clear understanding.

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The interviewee added that in order to get benefits from stakeholder involvement in service identification phase of SOA, there should be good strategies to handle the involvement. Although different ideas help the system covering different aspects, the ideas should to be limited in order to save the time and prevent conflicts. Apper company involves the project manager of the customer to decide about this measurement scale. He added that it happens a lot that users change their ideas during design which some of the ideas may cause modification and some actually add value to the system. In both cases since the managers are involved in the process and they see the reasons, they are convinced in terms of time and costs until the customer is satisfied.

The interviewee pointed out that the security and trust in some issues is very crucial. For

example in development of a bank system, the consultancy company should sign some papers in order to keep some issues safe. And as the consultancy company taking the responsibility of the customer to modernize the system, they should have some sort of insurance that shows

everything will go fine. In high security cases the consultant company should inform the name of all the work forces who are supposed to work as consultants, since the customer wants to check for their clearance in terms of crime. But there are many projects which are not sensitive about security issues.